Ragtime: Code name of NSA’s Secret
Domestic Intelligence Program Revealed in New Book
“Deep
State” uncovers new details about the agency’s secretive
and
hugely controversial surveillance programs.
Published February
27, 2013
More than a decade after the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, a set of extraordinary and secretive surveillance programs conducted
by the National Security Agency has been institutionalized, and they have
grown.
These
special programs are conducted under the code name Ragtime, and are divided
into several subcomponents, according to the new book Deep State: Inside the Government
Secrecy Industry, by Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady. (I purchased
a copy this morning.)
The
authors, both journalists who cowrote a previous book about special operations
in the military, have dug deep into the code names and operational nitty gritty
of the NSA's secretive and hugely controversial surveillance programs, and
they've come up with impressive new details.
Ragtime,
which appears in official reports by the abbreviation RT, consists of four
parts.
Ragtime-A
involves US-based interception of all foreign-to-foreign
counterterrorism-related data;
Ragtime-B deals with data
from foreign governments that transits through the US;
Ragtime-C deals with
counterproliferation actvities;
and then there's Ragtime-P,
which will probably be of greatest interest to those who continue to demand
more information from the NSA about what it does in the United States.
P stands for Patriot Act.
Ragtime-P is the remnant of the original President’s Surveillance Program,
the name given to so-called "warrantless wiretapping" activities
after 9/11, in which one end of a phone call or an e-mail terminated inside the
United States. That collection has since been brought under law, but civil
liberties groups, journalists, and legal scholars continue to seek more
information about what it entailed, who was targeted, and what
authorities exist today for domestic intelligence-gathering.
Deep
State has some answers.
Only about three dozen NSA
officials have access to Ragtime's intercept data on domestic counter-terrorism
collection. That's a tiny handful of the agency's workforce, which has been
pegged at about 30,000 people.
As many as 50 companies have
provided data to this domestic collection program, the authors report.
If
the NSA wants to collect information on a specific target, it needs one
additional piece of evidence besides its own "link-analysis"
protocols, a computerized analysis that assigns probability scores to each
potential target. This is essentially a way to use a computer data-mining
program to help determine whether someone is a national security threat. But
the authors find that this isn't sufficient if NSA wants to collect on said
target. And while the authors found that the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court rarely rejects Ragtime-P requests, it often asks the NSA to
provide more information before approving them.
How the surveillance is
approved tells us a lot about the breadth of the NSA's intelligence gathering.
The court and the Attorney General both certify a slate of approved targets
under Ragtime-P, the authors find. That includes a certain amount of "bulk
data"—such as phone call logs and records—that can be collected around
those targets. An NSA official told the authors that Ragtime-P can process as
many as 50 different data sets at one time.
What
happens next looks like a 21st-century data assembly line. At the NSA's
headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, a program called Xkeyscore processes all
intercepted electronic signals before sending them to different
"production lines" that deal with specific issues. Here, we find
another array orities
set by the Director of National Intelligence; Airgap, which deals with missions
that are a priority for the Departmentjustify;">
Pinwale is the main NSA
database for recorded signals intercepts, the authors report. Within it, there
are various keyword compartments, which the NSA calls
"selectors."
Metadata (things like the
"To" and "From" field on an e-mail) is stored in a database
called Marina. It generally stays there for five years.
In a database called Maui
there is "finished reporting," the transcripts and analysis of calls.
(Metadata never goes here, the authors found.)
As all this is happening,
there are dozens of other NSA signals activity lines, called SIGADS, processing
data. There's Anchory, an all-source database for communications intelligence;
Homebase, which lets NSA analysts coordinate their searches based on priorities
set by the Director of National Intelligence; Airgap, which deals with missions
that are a priority for the Department of Defense; Wrangler, an electronic
intelligence line; Tinman, which handles air warning and surveillance; and
more.
Lest you get confused by this
swirl of code names and acronyms, keep this image in mind of the NSA as a
data-analysis factory. Based on my own reporting, the agency is collecting so
much information every day that without a regimented, factory-like system, analysts
would never have the chance to look at it all. Indeed, they don't analyze much
of it. Computers handle a chunk, but a lot of information remains stored for
future analysis.
We have a preceding example
to test this hypothesis, albeit in a limited fashion. In 2004, the senior
leadership of the Justice Department and the FBI threatened to resign over what
they saw as illegal collection activities at the NSA, collection actlass="p3" style="line-height: 12.6pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.1in; text-align: justify;">
That the NSA is policing
itself may come as small comfort to many critics of the Obama administration's
intelligence programs. The size of the "compliance staff" that
monitors this activity is only about four or five people, depending on what's
available in the budget at any moment, the authors report. They also say
that we cannot know whether the program is pushing beyond the boundaries of the
law.
However, outside the closed
circle of about three dozen NSA employees who are read in to Ragtime, there
more than 1,000 people "outside the NSA are privy to the full details
of the program." If NSA is breaking the law, "how much longer can
that secret last?" the authors ask.
We have a preceding example
to test this hypothesis, albeit in a limited fashion. In 2004, the senior
leadership of the Justice Department and the FBI threatened to resign over what
they saw as illegal collection activities at the NSA, collection activities
that are still going on under Ragtime and under new surveillance law.
Back then, James Comey,
acting as Attorney General while John Ashcroft was in the hospital, refused to
sign a set of certifications provided by the Justice Department to Internet,
financial, and data companies, the authors report. Why? Comey believed that the
justification for providing bulk data to the NSA wasn't sufficient.
The administration's tortured
logic "drove him bonkers. There was just no way to justify this," the
authors report, quoting people who have spoken to Comey, who has never publicly
said why he objected. Interestingly, the authors find that the parts of the
program he was objecting to didn't implicate the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act.
This
comports with my own reporting in my book, The Watchers. The NSA
was making "mirrors" of telecommunications databases, so that
analysts could go through the data and mine it for clues. As it has been
explained to me, the problem here dealt with how the government viewed its
legal authorities to access data stored in computers, and whether analysts
could dip back into it without specific authorizations. Importantly, this data
consisted of that so-called "bulk data." It wasn't recorded phone
calls or the text of e-mails. That information was governed by FISA--or should
have been--because it was considered "content" under law, and that
requires a warrant to obtain.
The White House panicked when
Comey and Ashcroft refused to sign off, Ambinder and Grady report, fearing that
the companies on which NSA was depending for information would cut the agency
off if they didn't get a signed order from the Attorney General himself. It
took six months for the administration to reshape the program so that it
comported with "interpretation of the metatdata provisions" that were
promulgated by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.
Had
these officials resigned, it's unthinkable that the secrets of NSA's
intelligence gathering activities would have stayed hidden. A year later, in
2005, they were revealed in part by the New York Times. Here, too,
Ambinder and Grady have some new insights. It turns out that while the NSA's
director, General Michael Hayden, was publicly excoriating the newspaper for
disclosing the classified activities, he was privately glad that
they withheld what he considered key operational details.
Here is the scheme: Bloomberg News reported on Feb
14, 2011 that President Obama’s budget for FYE2012 will include $307 billion in
grants to Silicon Valley. Specifically, the individual grant amounts in Obama’s
budget are: $148 billion for research and development, $80 billion for federal
information systems and $77.4 billion for computer education. Much (most?) of
the grant money will be spent for Africa’s Internet.
outflow from the U.S. treasury. While we struggle to
pay for health and indigent assistance, our constant wars and our corroding
infrastructure, these grants will indeed bury us further into debt.
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